The source simulation technique is a general tool for calculating the sound radiation or scattering from complex-shaped structures into the three-dimensional space. The basic idea of the method consists in replacing the structure by a system of acoustical sources placed in the interior of the structure. By definition, these source functions have to satisfy the Helmholtz equation and the radiation condition. For solving the radiation or scattering problem completely, the source system also has to fulfill the boundary conditions on the surface of the body. Spherical wave functions with different source locations are used as sources, since they can easily be calculated. For minimizing the boundary error, the method of weighted residuals is applied. Depending on the choice of the weighting functions, different variants of the source simulation technique are obtained, for example, the null-field equations and the full-field equations. The full-field equations may lead to better conditioned sets of equations than the null-field equations. The null-field and the full-field equations can also be derived from the interior or exterior Helmholtz integral equation, respectively. For demonstrating the capacity of the method, the source simulation technique is applied to a scattering problem.
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